Writing articles as I am sure many of you know is a very popular way of increasing the amount of backward links that you have pointing to your site. In theory, the more of these backward links we are able to obtain, the more traffic our site should receive. There are however some very important things to take into consideration when writing and submitting your articles as you do not want to be wasting your time and you do not want your site to get dropped by the major search engines or put in some sort of sandbox.

The first thing to remember is that Rome was not built in a day. What I mean is if you have a new website, about for example hair loss, you may want to reach the top ten in Google for your keywords within say six months. You hear that one way to do this is by building up good number of backward links to this hair site. You think that the more the merrier and start pounding out one article after the other and are very proud of yourself after the first month because you were able to write fifty articles all pointing to your new hair website.

I believe this approach to be totally wrong. The hair loss websites which are in the top ten of Google have probably been around for quite a number of years and will without doubt have a number of quality backward links. If your site sticks around for a long time and you continue to build up its backward links it will go higher and higher in the search engines over time.

The one thing you do not want to do is to raise any red flags with the search engines. A new site which has eight hundred backward links after one month could raise this red flag. The search engines will now probably not trust this site and could easily put it in some sort of sandbox until it decides whether it is kosha or not.

In my opinion it is important to build up the number of backward links to a new website fairly slowly. When writing articles, I would personally only write one article with a link to a new website per week. Of course if you have ten websites, you are able to write ten articles if you only decide to have one link on each article etc.

I also think that it is very worthwhile to only submit the same article to around five or six of the different article directories. I would submit the article in total to around twenty-two article directories but would have around four variations of it etc. The differences in each article are not massive but are big enough to make it more original. There is a big thing being debated at the moment in webmaster circles about the potential damage that can be caused by duplicate content. From what I have read, everybody seems to have a different opinion on this subject. My opinion is that it is better to be safe than sorry, therefore why take the risk? It would be good however if the major search engines could clarify their position on the subject, but lets face it, that is never going to happen.

In conclusion, my advice is to enjoy writing articles, have patience, build up the number of backward links slowly and to submit different variations of the same article to the directories.